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Interiors · 8 min read

Small apartments are a storage problem, not a style problem

Where the volume actually is in a 2BHK, and the joinery that buys back a room.

Small apartments are a storage problem, not a style problem

Most small-apartment advice is about visual tricks — light colours, mirrors, legs on furniture. Useful at the margin, irrelevant to the actual constraint, which is that the household owns more than the plan allows for.

The volume is above head height and below seat height, and both are usually wasted. Full-height wardrobes rather than 7-foot ones recover a metre of depth-times-width per run. Bed storage takes the seasonal items that otherwise occupy a shelf you need weekly.

The second move is deciding what does not need to be in the flat at all. A 2BHK that stores luggage, festival crockery and winter bedding in prime cupboard space is not short of storage; it is short of triage.

Only after that does layout help — and when it does, it is usually by removing a wall between kitchen and living rather than by rearranging furniture.

It is not short of storage. It is short of triage.

Build your bill of quantities

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